Bernie Sanders’ aides’ breach of Clinton data causes turmoil

Updated 3:10 pm, Friday, December 18, 2015

Jeff Weaver (left), campaign manager for Bernie Sanders, says the Democratic National Com mittee overreacted to a data breach: “They are trying to help the Clinton campaign,” he says.

Jeff Weaver (left), campaign manager for Bernie Sanders, says the Democratic National Com mittee overreacted to a data breach: “They are trying to help the Clinton campaign,” he says.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images

Bernie Sanders’ aides’ breach of Clinton data causes turmoil

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WASHINGTON — Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign angrily accused the Democratic Party of “taking our campaign hostage” on Friday after it was temporarily barred from using a trove of information about potential voters as punishment for improperly accessing data compiled by the campaign of rival Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The reaction of the Democratic National Committee to the data breach, the depth of which was debated by all involved, thrust into the open long-standing suspicions among Sanders and his supporters that the national party is unfairly working to support the candidacy of its front-runner.

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“Clearly, in this case, they are trying to help the Clinton campaign,” said Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver, who filed a lawsuit against the DNC on Friday demanding restoration of the campaign’s access to the voter database.

DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said “the Sanders campaign had inappropriately and systematically accessed Clinton campaign data,” rejecting Weaver’s effort to portray the breach as the fault of a software glitch and a small group of rogue staffers.

Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon said the campaign was “informed that our proprietary data was breached by Sanders campaign staff in 25 searches by four different accounts and that this data was saved into the Sanders’ campaign account.”

“We are asking that the Sanders campaign and the DNC work expeditiously to ensure that our data is not in the Sanders campaign’s account and that the Sanders campaign only have access to their own data,” he added.

The back-and-forth on the eve of the party’s final presidential debate of the year underscored Sanders’ attempt to cast himself as an antiestablishment upstart willing to take on Clinton, the unquestioned front-runner for the party’s nomination who is not beloved among some of the party’s most liberal voters.

But by firing his top data staffer and admitting that members of his staff looked at information that belonged to the Clinton campaign, Sanders also threatened to undercut his image as an honest broker seeking to foster a “political revolution” to help the nation’s poor and beleaguered middle class.

The DNC maintains an extensive database of voter information, which it rents to campaigns. The campaigns then update that database with their own information about voters. The data is used to target likely voters and anticipate what issues might motivate them to support a candidate.

The information is of particular importance in the first states to vote in the presidential nominating process, where a campaign’s ability to organize its supporters and make sure they cast a ballot can make the difference between winning and losing.

Firewalls are put in place to prevent campaigns from looking at data maintained by their rivals. But officials said the vendor that runs the system, NGP VAN, ran a software patch on Wednesday that allowed all users on the system to access data belonging to other campaigns.

Weaver said four members of the Sanders campaign had accessed the information, but only the actions of one, the campaign’s data director, had risen to the level of a fireable offense.